SwitzerlandCountrySteve Münch, a Swiss continuous-casting expert, supported steel plant engineers by phone. We turned his know-how into Caster Wizard: a FlutterFlow app for iOS and Android plus a web admin panel. The plant reports an issue in a few taps and gets the expert's analysis and recommendations back.
What we did
Tasks
Team
Challenge
Engineers reached the expert by phone. Photos and parameters got lost, answers stayed in one person's head, and support couldn't grow beyond one plant.
Solution
A mobile app for the plant team and a web admin panel for the expert: structured reports, chat, a searchable archive with recommendations and role-based access per company.
Result
MVP live on iOS, Android and web in about four months. According to the client, efficiency and capacity to serve clients grew by 50%.
+50%
efficiency and capacity to serve clients
Client, verified Clutch review
~4 mo.
from discovery to a live MVP
3
platforms: iOS, Android and a web admin panel
5.0
Clutch rating: “All deadlines were met.”
The client
Steve Münch is a product manager from Switzerland. At a large steel plant he oversees and fine-tunes continuous casting, the line where molten steel becomes red-hot billets. When a breakout or defect hits the caster, engineers call him. He wanted to turn that expertise into a subscription product that several plants can use at once.
The challenge
In casting, every minute of downtime is expensive, yet support worked like a hotline. Steve needed an MVP fast and on a sensible budget to test whether plants would pay for digital expert support.
A defect described over the phone arrives without photos, casting parameters or history.
Solutions lived in call notes, so recurring breakouts were diagnosed from scratch.
Each call took the expert's full attention. A second plant meant twice the hours.
Discovery & UX
Before the first screen, our business analyst worked through Steve's reports, case histories and technical PDFs: which defects occur most often, how they are logged and which parameters drive a decision. The outcome was a set of user stories, a prioritised MVP scope and one design idea: a cockpit with gauges, colour signals and an obvious next action.
We mapped both sides of the service. The plant team reports an issue, follows its status and chats. The expert sees every customer, checks the description and submits a conclusion the customer is notified about.
Every entity (report, comment, breakout, defect, message) got its fields and actions defined up front. That made the FlutterFlow build predictable and kept the app to four tabs: Dashboard, Chat, Analyzer and Settings.
We wireframed every key screen in grey (login, dashboard, the report wizard, report details, chat and team management) and walked Steve through the flows. At this stage a change costs minutes, not sprints.
Mobile app · iOS & Android
A dark, high-contrast interface with large figures, readable at a glance even away from the desk.
Not raw telemetry, but an analytical view against target values. Breakouts, defects and process issues are colour-coded (red critical, yellow at risk, blue normal) with reported vs. resolved cases and a resolution rate per class. One tap on “+” starts a new report.
Pick the class of problem (breakout, defect or process issue), answer a few targeted questions such as casting speed and attach photos. It feels like quick diagnostics rather than paperwork, and drafts are saved if the engineer gets interrupted.
Each report has three tabs: Info with the casting parameters, Analysis with the expert's findings and concrete actions, and Files with photos. A typical action: reduce superheat below 40 °C or check mould wear. Once answered, the status switches to “Processed”.
One-to-one or group chats with the expert and the company's specialists. Everyone logs in with their own account, roles are tagged (owner, manager, engineer, operator), and the whole team shares the same context.
The company owner adds colleagues, assigns roles and manages access by email. The app mirrors the plant's real structure, with no support ticket for every new shift member.
Web admin panel
Steve's side runs in the browser: a lightweight CRM for metallurgy with every customer, report and conversation in one place. Light and calm, built for long working sessions at a desk.
Gauges for breakouts, defects and process issues per company, plus a live feed of updates. The expert sees where attention is needed before anyone picks up the phone.
All reports in one table: company, status, type, steel grade, date, comments and author. Filter by “Not processed” to work through the queue, or by steel grade to see how a similar case was solved last month.
Parameters, attached files and an internal comment thread sit on one page. The expert changes the status and writes recommendations right there, and the plant sees them in the app straight away.
Switch between companies and talk to their teams without leaving the panel. The member list shows who is in the conversation and in which role.
A new customer is set up in minutes: create the company, add users, assign positions and approve access requests. Access is email-based and can be revoked at any time, which matters when plant staff rotates.
Tech stack
The goal was to validate a business model, not to fund a year of native development. With FlutterFlow a small team delivered the iOS and Android apps and the web admin panel, while Firebase runs the backend. Under the hood it is real Flutter code that can be exported and extended once the product outgrows low-code.
iOS and Android apps and the web admin panel, built visually on top of Flutter.
Email-based access per company, revocable at any time.
Reports, chats and roles, synced in real time.
Defect photos and attachments in one place.
Results
Support now runs as a structured flow instead of phone calls. Every report arrives with parameters and photos, every answer is stored with recommendations, and the knowledge base grows with each case, even when plant teams change.
Roadmap
Version 2.0 is in planning. Alongside development, we support Caster Wizard with marketing: AI-generated product videos and cross-posting.
“All deadlines were met.”
Xmethod developed a multidisciplinary mobile app for a steel plant consultancy. The team built the entire app infrastructure for iOS and Android, designed the UI/UX, and created a unique admin panel. Xmethod's work improved the client's efficiency and capacity to interact with clients by 50%. The team met all deadlines and was highly available, flexible, and responsive.
Steve Münch
Founder · Caster Wizard
Verified review on Clutch · ★ 5.0
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Dennis Polevik
CEO
Dennis Polevik
CEO
What happens next?
